How one game developer is making The Pirate Bay work for him

McPixel creator turns a pirated torrent into promotional opportunity.

Figuring out the best way to handle game piracy continues to be a major concern for developers both big and small. Some major publishers are increasingly looking to an unpiratable free-to-play model to blunt piracy's effects, while some smaller developers have offered amnesty sales to try and coax some money out of pirates, or tried to engage pirates in conversation about why they download games illegally rather than buying them.

McPixel developer Sos Sosowski has taken a different tack, one that gives new meaning to the phrase "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Starting this morning, and continuing through the entire weekend, Sosowski is actively directing people to pirate his game using the Torrent link posted on The Pirate Bay, and asking them to donate whatever they want in return. Further, the pay-what-you-want sale is being actively promoted on the front page of The Pirate Bay, where tens of millions of visitors will see a short, conciliatory message from Sosowski (seen above).

"I know that not everyone can afford entertainment. But everyone needs it," the message reads in part. "And even though I make games for a living. I am most happy just to see people enjoy them. So today, you can download a torrent of my game. And if you like it, throw some coins in my general direction."

This isn't the first time The Pirate Bay has donated its heavily trafficked front page space to promoting a specific project. Since January, dozens of artists have been featured as part of The Promo Bay, which is what the site calls its rotating "promotional apparatus" for unnnoticed artists of all stripes. But while The Promo Bay effort attracted over 5,000 applications in its first three months of existence, almost 90 percent of those seeking promotion were musicians, with the remainder reportedly mainly made up primarily of authors and moviemakers. This is the first time the front page banner has been used to promote an indie video game (though the front page featured print-and-play collectible strategy card game Empires & Generals back in May, and the banner has linked to internal searches for Grand Theft Auto in the past).

Sosowski's path to The Promo Bay didn't go through the normal application process, though. It all started last month, when Sosowski tells Ars he was actually excited to find that McPixel, which launched in late June, had become popular enough to warrant a torrent on The Pirate Bay. Sosowski went into the comments for that Pirate Bay torrent post, politely asking for donations and offering a few free, legitimate gift codes for those who felt they really couldn't pay anything.

That kindhearted response attracted the notice of a redditor who said "these kind of developers truly deserve recognition." The reddit community apparently agreed, as the screenshot of The Pirate Bay comment attracted enough attention to hit the top position on reddit's front page, leading to a barrage of traffic that shut down the official McPixel website (The Pirate Bay torrent continued to work just fine, we assume). It wasn't until after the site was retored and Sosowski hosted a popular Ask Me Anything post about the deal that The Pirate Bay came calling, offering him the promotional spot "upon noticing how cool I am about all that," as he put it to Ars Technica.

The donation sections of McPixel.net comes way down the page from the torrent link right at the top.

The front page of McPixel.net currently features a large link to The Pirate Bay torrent download, which features a full version of the game for Mac, PC, and Linux (versions for iOS, Android and Blackberry are also available for sale). You have to scroll down well below that to find a PayPal donation link for the game.

As of this writing late Friday afternoon (less than a day after the promotion started), Sosowski says he's has sold over 300 copies of the game at an average of $1.43 each. That might seem like a slow start for the donation effort, especially considering that the BitTorrent download recently hit over 3,000 simultaneous seeders. It also seems a bit small compared to other pay-what-you-want download efforts like The Humble Indie Bundle, which quickly made millions while taking donations of as little as a penny for a package of five well known indie games (though even that effort ran in to its own piracy problems).

Still, it's a significant increase from the 100 or so copies of McPixel Sosowski sold for $10 on the game's first day of availability (before attention from reddit and "Let's Play" videos on YouTube).

For his part, Sosowski isn't worried that promoting a game on a site known for piracy might be more effective at attracting more pirates than actual paying customers. "The game was already available on TPB beforehand, and I believe if someone didn't want to pay, he just didn't," Sosowski told Ars. "It is up to people to decide how much they would like to pay for the game, and I have no worries. I am happy that more people can enjoy my game... TPB is one of the most visited sites in the Internet, and simply having a game there is a form of advertisement and promotion.

And since he doesn't see any direct profit from those using a Pirate Bay torrent anyway, Sosowski said that his best recourse was to tell his story to that audience and hope that some of them choose to pay up. "I think that if people who torrent the game are aware that there is a live person behind the game, and makes the game for a living, they are more willing to provide support than to a giant lifeless studio," he said.

I love that this is an option, and that people like him exist. I went and donated $10 as well, just for being badass about it all.

This kind of thing is EXACTLY what the Internet is about. It's not about social networking/etc, it's about the freedom of ideas and exploring new/better methods of doing things. I presently live in a country where $500-800 a MONTH is considering middle class (and solid middle class too). My otherwise regular middle class American income is downright wealthy here, my $700/mo rent is more than a LOT of people make.

While people here are not shy about pirating, they also are VERY not shy about supporting people who support them. A $50 game is pretty much their monthly gaming budget, if not quarterly, where it might be my WEEKLY.

Attention whoring and capitulating to pirates may work but is wrong. It promotes the wrong attitude. So what are Activision supposed to do, put the next CoD on Pirate Bay and hope to return 100 000 000 investment from $5 donations?

The way I look at this is the Studios forced consumers to think outside the box. That caused developers to start thinking outside the box. Yet a lot of studios won't touch anything that doesn't fit neatly in their box since they can't control what's outside it.

Ubisoft has really turned a page and is thinking outside the box. One reason I don't buy games I want is due to the requirement of always having to be connected to the internet. I don't game online and I actually disable my internet connection & a lot of my security so it doesn't interfere when I game. I can deal with a one time online activation that Ubisoft if sporting.

Attention whoring and capitulating to pirates may work but is wrong. It promotes the wrong attitude. So what are Activision supposed to do, put the next CoD on Pirate Bay and hope to return 100 000 000 investment from $5 donations?

I think you may have taken the wrong impression from the comment and the article. This guy is most likely a solo indie developer that cannot try to fight piracy the way Activision can. He's not really attention whoring hes just asking that pirates donate anything to help him make more games. Its obvious that his passion is for games not profit, and he doesn't want to force DRM down anyones throat or start a war on pirates to piss off people that already pirate. Fighting piracy ala Ubisoft and Activision cause more piracy, but allowing for amnesty or flexible pay what you want pricing will draw more legitimate customers in. True AAA studios don't have that option as they have multi-million dollar budgets, but indie efforts have had a bigger effect on curbing piracy than anything AAA studios have done.

And since he doesn't see any direct profit from those using a Pirate Bay torrent anyway, Sosowski said that his best recourse was to tell his story to that audience and hope that some of them choose to pay up. "I think that if people who torrent the game are aware that there is a live person behind the game, and makes the game for a living, they are more willing to provide support than to a giant lifeless studio," he said.

Hasn't that always been the problem through out history? As long as something or someone is perceived as being devoid of it's humanity, then it's OK to do bad things to it or them?

Attention whoring and capitulating to pirates may work but is wrong. It promotes the wrong attitude. So what are Activision supposed to do, put the next CoD on Pirate Bay and hope to return 100 000 000 investment from $5 donations?

Well, I suppose they should try making a decent game... </badoom-PSshhhhhhhh>

I like it. Pay what you can. But I looked at the "Let's Play" and the game just does not appeal to me. I like the art style (reminds me of the SCUMM adventure games from the '80s) but the always-explosions theme got old after the second or third one. Is it a game or a (woefully misguided) art piece?

Pay what you can is an attractive model for indie devs since it attracts attention (not accusing him of attention whoring) and it makes people want to pay more than they would otherwise. If he'd put it out there at $7.99, a lot of people might say "I don't think that game is worth 8 bucks" but this "pay what you can/want" thing, plus the Pirate Bay partnership, people are happy throwing him a $10 spot to support his efforts, and he really hasn't made any per se, he just marketed his game a little differently.

More power to him, I wish him the best even though he's not making a game I want to play. Though the "Free DLC" seen on the main menu is something the rest of the industry could learn from. Although I don't think they will.

Attention whoring and capitulating to pirates may work but is wrong. It promotes the wrong attitude. So what are Activision supposed to do, put the next CoD on Pirate Bay and hope to return 100 000 000 investment from $5 donations?

Let indie developers do what they can in order to make a profit from their creation/s. The reason why pirate bay exists is because the big developers are indeed greedy and they will stop at nothing in order to turn maximum profit around. Remember the struggle with the music industry and piracy? </nuff said.>

While I hope this works out for him, I feel required (as an employee of a lifeless studio) to note that in 99% of cases it's sadly not a sustainable option for game development. If this is a success for him (again, i hope so), it'd be hard to attribute that success to the quality of the game itself. I'd still feel inclined to support him even if the game isn't very good, simply because of how he acted. There are an awful lot of very nice starving artists out there.

Indie games are awesome, and some of my favorite titles are the 'pure passion of development' kind (Bastion?). But game development is, for better or worse, a business. If everyone took this route, it wouldn't be a sustainable business.

I think what studios need to realize, is that people WILL pay, even if they can get it for free, if the games are of high enough quality. The problem we're seeing today, is that most of the games (especially from large studios who stick to their franchises) simply aren't high quality.

I think what studios need to realize, is that people WILL pay, even if they can get it for free, if the games are of high enough quality. The problem we're seeing today, is that most of the games (especially from large studios who stick to their franchises) simply aren't high quality.

I doubt Sos is reading this, but he'd have done a bit better on donations if the buttons said $1 $2 $3 $4 along the top row. I know people can press the custom button, but the leap from $1 to $5 and then to $10 & $25 is a big gap psychologically. Treat it as pricing rather than a donation page.

How is he being forced to do this? Fact is, no-one is interested in pirating this game anyway and people are only giving him money purely to support the ideology, not because his game is actually competitive in the market.

Attention whoring and capitulating to pirates may work but is wrong. It promotes the wrong attitude. So what are Activision supposed to do, put the next CoD on Pirate Bay and hope to return 100 000 000 investment from $5 donations?

I'd be happier if they didn't make a next CoD at all, frankly, and invested that time, energy and money into producing something half-decent instead.

Maybe trying to apply an economic model which is entirely based on scarcity to a product which is infinitely and freely replicable is not such a robust business model either?

I hate to have to be the one to break this to you man, but treating lines of code as if they were loaves of bread just isn't ever going to work. There is a genuine qualitative difference there which has real practical consequences, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the matter.

Right now the only reason that major publishing businesses (games included) can exist is due to government protection, in the form of wildly out-of-proportion punishments for people who don't pay. That sounds like a business model entirely based on rentseeking to me, something which benefits nobody. Hell, if you're gonna be that dependent on the guv'mnt why not just go that tiny little bit further and get the government to pay your wage? Sure it's kinda-sorta communism, but at least it would be a lot more efficient (i.e. more copies consumed per dollar of input).

At least Sos is being self-reliant enough to get out there and experiment with business models which address the particular problems that he is facing as a developer (in his case obscurity, since, as Corey Doctorow says "It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity"). And it seems to be working: frontpage of Reddit, pirate bay landing page, article on Ars -that's the kind of exposure that money just can't buy. OK, so his particular solution might not suit you, but rather than bitch and whine about it why don't you take some inspiration from his example and think creatively about business models which might work for you?

Better, in my humble opinion, to release a game for free, with modifiable source code and middleware tools for the modding community that are also Open Source and hope that people will pay for a book containing a tutorial, reference, etc. for these. Sure, most of this material will be online, but not everyone has multiple monitors to allocate one for a hypertextual guide, others may want to add to their bookshelf, or something to read when away from the computer.

It would be deluded for me to expect guaranteed remuneration for the game I have been working on. I do it for myself and if anyone else eventually plays it, that's fine... I don't really care what they think of it, so $ don't even enter into it.

Starting this morning, and through the entire weekend, Sosowski is actively directing people to pirate his game using the Torrent link posted on The Pirate Bay, and asking them to donate whatever they want in return.

How is it "pirating" if he's actually offering people to download it for free?

Yeah, that was pretty big news a while ago, cheriff. Incredibly easy to get around it though, and combined with the fact there's hundreds of other trackers unblocked you've got to wonder why they even bothered. Just to make a petty gesture I suppose.

I think what studios need to realize, is that people WILL pay, even if they can get it for free, if the games are of high enough quality. The problem we're seeing today, is that most of the games (especially from large studios who stick to their franchises) simply aren't high quality.

Then the sales figures would reflect that subjective assumption.

Most people just want more of the same, especially FPS,... so they sell. And online gaming and DLC can't be pirated...

[checks calendar] who would have expected 2012 to be the year shareware comes back into the fore ?

Shareware: It's the new black !

That is an amazing way to look at this. I wholeheartedly agree.

I downloaded the Lite version on the market (thanks for the heads-up, Porkrinds), and this game works even better for quick spurts of nonsense on the go. It is however, much too simple: there are tons of free flash games around that are much more complex and rewarding and are free. I would not pay much more than $1 for it, maybe more if it came with an editor and DLC was offered as user-created rooms. Still, I applaud this guy's initiative and hope this works out for him.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area.